Nvidia developed the GeForce graphics processors that helped make it a market-cap leader in artificial intelligence hardware.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The company first focused on graphics hardware for personal computers and became closely associated with three-dimensional gaming through its GeForce product line, introduced in 1999.
Its graphics processing units, or GPUs, later became important for scientific computing and machine-learning workloads. Unlike CPUs, GPUs contain many parallel processing cores, making them well suited to the calculations used to train and run neural networks. Nvidia also built a major software ecosystem around CUDA, its parallel-computing platform.
Nvidia is often confused with AMD because both make graphics processors. Nvidia, however, is the company behind the GeForce brand and the CUDA platform. Its market value has risen sharply as demand for data-center AI accelerators has expanded.